Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Upswing

Are you ready for some good news? For a change?

Henry has really gotten the hang of nursing! He just seemed to "click" with the idea of sucking and swallowing (and breathing) and has had a very good run of oral feeding. He got his first bottle at 1 a.m. last night and he did very well at that, too. The nurse practitioner who is in charge of Henry's case said that if he continues to do well he may be ready to come home this weekend. Did you catch that? This weekend.

I'm bringing in his car seat when I go in again this afternoon. Preemies need to have a "trial" in their car seat, hooked up to monitors for a period of time (15 min? 20 min? I can't remember what happened for Thomas). They want to make sure that their position in the car seat doesn't cause them to have apnea spells. Henry will also have another scan where he will be hooked up to very sensitive monitors for 24 hours and the doctors will see if he's having spells of not breathing or dropping their heartbeat that are too brief for the regular monitors to catch.

If he passes all of these tests, then he will finally be discharged and allowed to come home. Our house, of course, isn't anything to look at right now and is causing me more than a fair share of stress as the end of our remodel keeps getting pushed back. Everything is in disarray as we wait for the end of this (horrible) project. But I don't want to think about that right now. All I want to think about is that our time at the hospital may be coming to an END!